My friend and colleague Craig Looney has posted a comment (on my August 26th, 2009th post, “On My Motivation in Seeking a Demonstration That There Is or There Is Not a God”) that warrants a response in the form of a post, more visible than a comment on a comment would be. He begins by speaking of “a couple of it issues that fuzzy up the project of finding a proof of the existence or non-existence of ‘God.’” This post is devoted to the first of these issues, which he spells out as:
[1] The term “God” can mean a wide range of things. In order to even ask the question, it is necessary to define the properties (or ranges of properties) of the God that is to be proved or refuted. This may seem obvious, but many people advance a God that is “beyond definition,” or “the thing that is no thing,” etc. These God concepts are likely beyond logical proof/refutation, and are often beyond empirical testing (but see below).
If we define God as someone who can fly, kill people by pointing at them, etc (that is, as something a primitive culture might view as a deity) then God already exists, because we can outfit a person with a jetpack and a machine gun.
On the other hand, if we define God as all powerful and indestructible, then such a God is a logical impossibility, “for if it can destroy itself it is not indestructible, and if it can’t destroy itself then it isn’t all-powerful.
Craig is absolutely right that in saying that “The term ‘God’ can mean a wide range of things” and that “in order to even ask the question, it is necessary to define the properties (or ranges of properties) of the God that is to be proved or refuted.” In this post, therefore, I will begin to deal with the matter of what a god is, if there is one, or would be, if there were one. The raising of this question of the demonstrability of the existence or non-existence of a god has come, however, at an earlier point in the life of this blog than I had foreseen or laid the groundwork for; Nasr does not directly address it in The Garden of Truth. So I am approaching even as basic a matter as the definition of a god with some diffidence and reserving the right to revise later what I have to say now.
That being said, the god the existence of which can be demonstrated must of course be a “logical possibility.” Thus “the thing that is no thing,” taken thus baldly, is clearly not something that can be demonstrated to exist. In fact, contra Craig, its existence can be immediately refuted, for, applying the Principle of Non-Contradiction, no being or existent can be both a thing and not a thing, in any one respect and at any one time. Of course, if by “the thing that is no thing” we actually mean “the being that is no physical thing,” the immediate refutation just given is no longer relevant.
Going with Craig a bit deeper, a god that is “all powerful and indestructible” is indeed “a logical impossibility,” for, as he says, “if it can destroy itself it is not indestructible, and if it can’t destroy itself then it isn’t all-powerful.” But all is not lost here, for that observation does not rule out as logically impossible an indestructible god that is, not simply all-powerful, but, to use a formulation that is perhaps good enough for the time being, capable of doing all that is possible. (I say “perhaps good enough for the time being” because there is much in “capable of doing all that is possible” that begs for further elucidation, e.g., just what does the “doing” or activity of a god consist in.)
Now if it exists, the god of which I have said, in the post immediately previous to this one, that I hope it exists and fear it does not and the existence of which I hope to eventually prove or disprove is an absolutely perfect being, an ens perfectissimum. From this and some allied assumptions it follows that it is a being absolutely perfect in knowledge, in love and will, and in power, and perhaps in yet other things (e.g., aesthetic appreciation of the beautiful). (All this is said in full awareness that there is much that needs to be made explicit in just what a perfect being might be and even more so in just what a being perfect in knowledge, in love and will, and in power might be.)
That’s on the one hand. On another hand, in the immediately previous post I made reference to an argument for the existence of a god, the validity of which is evident, though its soundness is not. That argument is not one that makes use of “perfect being” or “being perfect in knowledge, in love and will, and in power” as the operative definition. A variation of the kind of argument evident in the first two of Thomas Aquinas’s quinque viae, it has as a point of departure a definition of a god looking something like this: “an efficient cause of all other beings and effect of no other,” i.e., an “uncaused cause.” All this needs spelling out and that such a being would in fact be perfect requires further demonstration. So too would the thesis that that god is unique, not just a god, but the god.
On a third hand, if I may, in the immediately previous post I also made reference to an argument for the non-existence of a god, the validity of which argument is evident, though its soundness is not. This argument, known as the argument “from evil,” does make use of a conception of a god as a “being perfect in knowledge, in love and will, and in power.”
Setting my review of The Garden of Truth aside a bit longer, in my next post I will spell out the argument from evil in the way that I think it has to be spelled out.